White House awkwardly defends Afghanistan ‘scramble’ after Biden comment comes back to haunt him

Biden had pledged there wouldn’t be scenes of Americans evacuating Afghanistan via helicopter

The Biden administration has defended chaotic scenes of airlift evacuations in Afghanistan after President Joe Biden recently declared that there would be no “hasty rush to the exits”.

The scenes from over the weekend and on Monday showed desperate Afghans clinging to the side of US air force jets as they tried to taxi down the runway at Hamid Karzai airport in Kabul.

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan responded to NBC News’ question on Monday about Mr Biden promising to avoid people being airlifted from the US embassy in Kabul by helicopter by awkwardly defending doing just that.

“To be fair, the helicopter has been the mode of transport from our embassy to the airport for the last 20 years,” Mr Sullivan said. “That’s how we move people back and forth...”

A US military helicopter is pictured flying above the US embassy in Kabul on 15 August 2021. (AFP via Getty Images)

Challenged by anchor Savannah Guthrie, who argued that “it’s the last-minute scramble when the assurances from the president himself were this is not what we are going to see,” Mr Sullivan conceded that cities across Afghanistan had fallen much faster than anticipated – and appeared to blame the Afghan army for lacking the willpower to resist the Taliban’s advance.

“Part of the reason for that,” he said, “is because, at the end of the day, despite the fact that we spent 20 years and tens of billions of dollars... we could not give them the will. And they ultimately decided they would not fight for Kabul and they would not fight for the country.”

This line of argument is separate from the main point that Ms Guthrie and others have been making since it became clear the Taliban was primed to take over most if not all of Afghanistan: that president Biden himself unambiguously predicted that the group would not achieve precisely what it now has done.

Last month during a press conference on the US withdrawal, Mr Biden said: “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the – of the United States from Afghanistan.”

Pushed on this point, Mr Sullivan insisted that there were no good options available to the president, and that the current fallout was the result of the president making the best choice available while the Afghan army failed to step up.

“I think the worst case scenario for the United States would be a circumstance in which we were adding back in thousands and thousands of troops to fight and die in a civil war in Afghanistan when the Afghan army wasn’t prepared to fight in it itself,” Mr Sullivan said.

“That was the alternative choice that Joe Biden faced. And what we learned over the course of the past two weeks is that if we had stayed one more year, or two more years, or five more years, or ten more years, no amount of training, equipping, or money, or lives lost by the United States was going to put the Afghan army in a position to sustain that country on its own.

“So the president had bad choices. And the choice he made, which was to bring US forces home, to get us out of that civil war, to get our diplomats out of the embassy, and to ultimately ask the Afghans to step up and fight for themselves – it is heartbreaking to see what is happening in Kabul, but the president had to make the best possible choice he could, and he stands by that decision.”

Mr Sullivan’s deputy, Jonathan Finer, was also dispatched to the airwaves this morning to defend and explain what the administration would do to help vulnerable Afghans, including those who have already applied for visas to the US.

“The United States has communicated to the Taliban in no uncertain terms that they are not to interfere with the safe passage of Afghans to [Kabul] airport who are looking to depart the country”, he told CNN. “We’ve been quite clear to the Taliban that should they interfere with those efforts, they will face severe consequences, and we have the military forces in place to execute that.”